EDIT II: The lcd-filtering overlay does not have an ebuild for the latest version of cairo. I have put together one ebuild (using latest patches from ubuntu and infinality). You can get it here. These ebuilds are now present in the lcd-filtering overlay.

Before I begin, full credits must go to PaulBredbury, Infinality and bi3l (gentoo-forums nick) who have done all the hard work on this.

Here’s my guide to get (what I believe) the best font rendering in Gentoo. Note that this uses ebuilds from an overlay, and thus is not officially supported by Gentoo. If you don’t know what an overlay is, look it up (and look up layman as well) on the internet. When you have your box configured to work with overlays, continue with this guide.

Now, emerge the following packages. Take care that these packages are being emerged from the lcd-filtering overlay and in the exact same order.

emerge -av1 freetype fontconfig libXft cairo

The .fonts.conf configuration file that I use is based on the one provided by Infinality. The only change that I have made is chose Aller as the default sans and sans-serif font, OFL Sorts Mill Goudy ast the default serif font and Inconsolata as the default monospace font. You can edit the provided .fonts.conf if you want to chose other fonts as the defaults. I have lost my alteration of .fonts.conf and the fact that I do not have currently have access to a Gentoo installation implies that I can not create and test a new one. In case you want to change the default fonts, you will have to do it via your DE or create your own .fonts.conf (if you work in a DE agnostic environment).

Install the fonts I use (if you want to). I would still recommend using these fonts though. They look brilliant.

Arial (media-fonts/corefonts)

Vista Fonts (Here)

Make sure your eselect fontconfig list looks like this (ignore the lohit family if you do not have it installed).

Let me first present to you how this would look like – you can then see whether you want to continue with this or not.

Now, if you feel that this is right for you, feel free to carry on.

First of all, to allay any claims of shameless plagiarism, this guide is inspired from the perfect guide which is available at Ubuntu Evolution (dead link)- in fact, the guidelines for Ubuntu users has been copied verbatim from there. Other users could also head over there if they want an alternative to the visual theme that will be provided here. The major difference is that this guide also deals with ways to integrate applications like skype, firefox, etc. into the provided visual theme.

Installing the Bespin Theme (Gentoo Users)

You must have layman configured and installed. If not, have a look here.

layman -L -k // As root, to refresh your list of overlays

layman -a kde // As root, add the kde overlay (this is where you will find the bespin theme)

emerge x11-themes/bespin

Installing the Bespin Theme (Ubuntu Users)

Rather than repeat the excellent tutorial by Ubuntu Evolution, I encourage you to head over there (dead link) and follow the section “Downloading and Installing of Bespin Style”. Also make sure that you install the development libraries that are mentioned there in the paragraph before this section.

Installing the Bespin Icon Theme (Gentoo Users)

I am acting under the assumption that you already have the bespin theme installed. The following instructions assume this. The instructions in italics are to be carried out as root, whereas the instructions in normal typeface need not be carried out as root.

cd /usr/portage/distfiles/svn-src/bespin/cloudcity/icons/

cp config.example config // Note: I have not edited the config.example file – you are free to edit it if you like

sh generate_kde_icons.sh

cp -rf nmfnms/ $(USER)/.kde4/share/icons/

cd $(USER)/.kde4/share/icons/

chown -R$(USER):$(USER)nmfnms/

chmod -R 755 nmfnms/

Now select the icon theme from System Settings -> Appearence -> Icons.

Installing the Bespin Icon Theme (Ubuntu Users)

Ubuntu users would do well to head over again to the Ubuntu Evolution post (dead link) and follow the section Bespin Icon Theme.

KDM Theme

My recommendation would be to use lzfy as your KDM theme. Feel free to try out the Bespin KDM theme as suggested by Ubuntu Evolution.

Ksplash Theme

I rather prefer the Glassified splash theme. I would like to use the KStarBoard theme – however it does not work for me. I don’t quite know why. However, I have created a B/W mod the KStarBoard mod of this theme – it is available here. I think it would go rather well with the setup – use it if it works for you. That mod has been lost recently.

Colour Scheme

You can download the colour scheme here. To add this Colour Scheme use System Settings -> Appearence -> Colors. The colour theme, too, has been lost in a recent outage. It was a mod of this theme. Thanks to Ivan (see comments below), I have a copy of the colour scheme. You can download it here. Once again, thanks Ivan!

Bespin Theme

The Bespin Theme is available here. To activate this simply follow the following steps:

I prefer the theme “Air for netbooks” (and I don’t use a netbook :P) which comes bundled with KDE SC 4.4. There is also a plasma theme which is catered for Bespin users – you can find it here. Use whatever suits you. 🙂

The Smooth Tasks Plasmoid

This is what provides the Windows 7 look to the System Taskbar. Head over to its kde-look page to get instructions on how to install it. Gentoo users can install the package kde-misc/smooth-tasks which is available in the kde layman – which as you might recall, we have already acquired.

Some specific Smooth Tasks settings.

General -> Grouping -> By Program Name.

General -> Sorting -> Alphabetically.

General -> Filters -> Only show tasks from the current desktop.

Appearance -> Tool Tip -> Tool Tip Style -> Smooth

Appearance -> Tool Tip -> Preview Style -> New

There are a plethora of other settings that you can play around with, but I would recommend the above for a “smooth” experience.

firefox – sadly there is no matching firefox theme. If someone can make one, I would be obliged. Meanwhile, I use the Oxygen theme and vimperator.

skype – use the latest 2.1 beta 2 (for linux) skype. This has support for Qt Styles – and works perfectly with the bespin theme.

Gtk Apps – this is always a pain. There really is no gtk theme that I have found which goes well with bespin. I am currently using Clearlooks – if anyone can find/make a theme which goes well with bespin, well I would indeed be grateful.

That is all I can think of for now. If you would like to know something more, feel free to comment.

P.S. For those of you who are interested in the conky configuration, have a look see here.

Everyone now head over to weather.com and register yourself. Obtain your XML Partner ID and License key. Use the following command to search for your location code. Change Zurich to your city name.
$ curl http://xoap.weather.com/search/search?where=Zurich

You can then get the location code from the output of the above command.

Download the conky configuration file from this link and save it to your home folder as .conkyrc.

Now download Conky Colors from gnome-look. Extract the archive and install all the fonts that are present in the package. Even though not all of the fonts are required for the setup (you can take a quick look at the conky configuration file to see which fonts are actually needed) the fonts are quite nice and having them on your computer won’t hurt at all.

Install conky if you have not already done so. IMP: This theme is tested with conky-1.8.0_rc2 so make sure you are using this or a newer release of conky. If you are on gnome please edit the configuration file to suit your needs (in particular change the location code to get the weather of the city you reside in) and then launch conky. If there are any particular hacks that are needed to integrate conky and gnome, my apologies for not being aware of them. Please feel free to add any such suggestions in the comments section, I will update the post with it.

KDE USERS:

If you are using KDE4, also install feh, an image loader which will help us to integrate conky seamlessly into the KDE environment. Now create this script, which we will use to launch conky.
$ nano conky.sh
#! /bin/bash
conky -&
sleep 3
feh --bg-scale `grep 'wallpaper=' ~/.kde4/share/config/plasma-desktop-appletsrc | tail --bytes=+11`

The above script is supposed to read your wallpaper settings and use that to redraw the background of conky. For some reason, it is not working for me so I hard-coded my wallpaper in to the script.
$ nano conky.sh
#! /bin/bash
conky &
sleep 3
feh --bg-scale /home/rahul/Pictures/Wallpapers/wall_abstract.jpg

Use whatever method suits you. Do remember to make the script executable.

chmod +x conky.sh

Take a final look at conkyrc. Make sure that you have the right location ID for the weather. Use KDE system settings to add this script at startup and voila! We are done. We now have the perfect conky setup. For immediate testing, launch the script.

There are already a coupleof informative articles on this. Good as they are, I managed to run into a couple of problems that are not detailed on these articles possibly due to the fact that they were written a long time ago. Therefore this article, to help others (and me) who in the future wish to achieve the same that I did.

CREATE DATABASE databasename; (create a database, replacing databasename with the name that you wish to choose)

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON databasename.* TO username@localhost IDENTIFIED by ‘password’; (Create a user for the above database, replacing username with the name that you intend to use. Similarly with password)

So, in view of the last post here is what I did manage to miss out on at home:

Movies

Yes, I missed out on 3 Idiots and Avatar.

Food

OK, there was no way I was missing out anything food related, was I? I gobbled lots of it. Should last me for a long time – till I go home again, that is.

Travel

Couldn’t get to Mahavirji – the train was delayed by more than 6 hours thanks to the legendary Delhi fog. Andaman, however was everything that I had imagined it to be and a lot more. Paradise on earth.

Watch

Yeah, I enjoyed lots of senseless TV, managed to catch cricket on TV (why did India have to lose that damned final to Sri Lanka?).

Enjoy

I enjoyed every day of my stay at home. There is no other place like it …

Only 6 days left and then I am in the most beautiful place on this earth – Dehradun, which also happens to be where home is. A big YAY for the semester break. Now, since I am going home after nearly a year there are a lot of things that I must do at home. So here is my todo list – things I simply must do when I get home.

In case you were not aware of it, the best theme for KDE4 is Bespin. Not Oxygen, not qtcurve. You might say that themes are like desktop wallpapers – to each his own. I would disagree. KDE4 brought along a slew of improvements and new paradigms to the Linux Desktop Environment and in its small way Bespin does that as far as theming on the desktop is concerned. Insanely customizable, it will allow your desktop to have the sort of look that you will fall in love with it.

Some features that I especially like about it:

“Air Like circle Overlays in Window backgrounds”

“Behave rather Maccish – except file management most other things activate on single click”

“Slim Sliders”

“Hacks – Animate all Tree views”

“Presets – switch configurations on the fly”

And some more ..

So, go ahead and try it! Most popular distros have a package for it. For Gentoo grab it from the kde-testing overlay (x11-thems/bespin-9999).

It has been a long time since I have last updated this blog. 7 months to be exact. Phew, that is a long time indeed. Keeping in mind the fact that I do love writing that is a very long absence. A long abstinence from writing however it has not been. I have been posting articles for my WordPress Blog, the Mercator College Blog and the Mercator Website. Those posts however deal more with my opinions rather than my day to day activities or events of note that have taken place (in my life) since I last updated my blog.

Sweeping changes, should I say? For a lot has changed, for starters I completed my bachelors at Jacobs University in Computer Science. A picture … (the only one that I have with me right now – I am still waiting to collect pictures from friends )

Then there was the summer. Thinking of doing something constructive, I decided to revamp the Mercator Website (old -> new). Took me the entire summer, but the satisfaction of completing how to make a dog an emotional support dog project was immense. As I explain in the About Section on the website seeing other colleges maintain a superior website to ours was not a pleasing experience, hence the effort. Hopefully the website is at par with the other college websites.

So, the folks at linux-mag have bench marked Gentoo(x86_64) compiled with march=core2 and -O2,-O3 or -Os and compared it with Ubuntu 9.04. While Ubuntu 9.10 is already out, the software used on Gentoo (seems that the used the stable branch of Gentoo) is closer to 9.04 than 9.10. And what do the results tell us? Exactly what we already knew. Gentoo kicks ass. We already knew that, didn’t we. However, what is interesting is that when most of the people have been harping that optimizing for a particular CPU (which I believe is the primary reason for the differences that we see) is not useful anymore, it seems that the this is really not the case. In my own experience, I concur. My Gentoo system has been far more responsive than my Ubuntu or even Arch systems ever were.

It is quite easy to not like Ubuntu. I do not like it, I can not use it anymore. A lot of you here would now expect me to provide a detailed overview as to why I do not like Ubuntu but this is not what this post is about. In a nutshell, allow me to say that the fact that Ubuntu is not a rolling release, it asks me to install *-dev packages if I want to compile software that links against those packages (think about compiling a plasmoid from kde-look.org that is not yet in the repos), the fact that I have to install a basic toolchain on a new install (if I want to compile my own kernel) ticks me off.

Now I take a step back and look again at the grievances that I have with Ubuntu, and the realization that three years ago the sentence above would have been Greek to me suddenly dawns on me. When I was introduced to Linux about three years ago, I had no idea what Linux was. I had never used it before, and had never seen anyone use it. Windows was the only thing that I had ever used (and I started with 3.1) and I was not aware of the alternatives that existed. So when my friend told me it was another operating system (being a computer science student I was interested in the fact that Linux is “just a kernel” and then we have separate distributions) I was interested. He got a Ubuntu Live CD and walked me through an installation. And within an hour I had a working Linux installation – no need of installing drivers – it seemed easier than windows. He told me to just go to the Ubuntu Forums if I have a problem.

Over the next week, I played around with it. Changing the wallpaper, changing the theme (Hey, there are a lot more options than Windows!)and changing the icons (hey, I can do this without installing any third-party apps! Cool!). In between, I learnt about 915resolution so that I could run my Intel 945GM at its native resolution (Intel drivers have come a long way since then). And it was not long before I was installing beryl and compiz, and showing off my transparent cubes, 3-D windows and all the other plugins that were built in with compiz.

Within a year, I came to realize how much I liked to use Linux. I learnt what a rolling release was, I learnt that I could configure my own kernel, and I learnt about building software from source (when a particular package was not available via apt-get). I moved over to Arch via a switched time (my first attempt at a Gentoo install was a failure :P) and soon I switched over to Gentoo where I have remained since then.

My point here is simple. I could not have started with Arch or Gentoo. I had no idea what Linux was, and I would have been lost with those distros. They assume a working knowledge of Linux. I was willing to learn, and Ubuntu was the perfect teacher. It eased my transition towards Linux and no other distro could have done a better job. Even now, no other distro out there can do a better job. And I recommend Ubuntu for any of my friend who is willing to try out Linux – because it is the easiest way to try Linux and yet not be lost.

In short, Ubuntu is like a primary school teacher. We learn the most from her, but then we all start talking about particle physics, nanotechnology, operating systems and haskell and what not; and forget her. But she remains our first teacher.